AUTHOR: Robert Connolly
Tushar Teredesai
DATE: 2005-06-19
LICENSE: GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2
SYNOPSIS: ELF shared library prelinking.
DESCRIPTION:
>From 'man 8 prelink':
Prelink is a program which modifies ELF shared libraries and ELF dynamically
linked binaries, so that the time which dynamic linker needs for their
relocation at startup significantly decreases and also due to fewer relocations
the run-time memory consumption decreases too (especially number of unshareable
pages). Such prelinking information is only used if all its dependant libraries
have not changed since prelinking, otherwise programs are relocated normally.
PREREQUISITES: Glibc-2.3.2 and newer
HINT:
Homepage: http://freshmeat.net/projects/prelink/
- First of all, never strip (or otherwise modify) programs or libraries after
they are prelinked. If you strip a prelinked program, the prelink application
will not undo it because it has been modified. Even if a program is already
stripped and you strip it again this will change the timestamp on the ELF header
sections. If you want to strip all your programs after they are prelinked, first
undo the prelinking with 'prelink -amu'.
- Secondly you need at least 50 megabytes of free space to prelink the whole
system; up to 200 megabytes of free space is needed if you have a lot installed.
If you do not have that much free space then only prelink a few programs at a
time.
- Thirdly, if you plan to use the X11 windowing system with prelinking you
should install a position independent version of libGL.so. By default the
libGL.so library that is included with X11 is not a true shared object, it does
not use shared memory, and can not be prelinked (so nothing linked to it can be
be prelinked). It is suggested that you install a patch to make libGL.so use
use position independent assembly code:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/patches/downloads/xorg/\
xorg-6.8.2-libGL_PIC-1.patch
And use these command in the xc/ directory to use -fPIC on libGL.so:
echo "#undef BuildLibGlxWithoutPIC" >> config/cf/linux.cf &&
echo "#define BuildLibGlxWithoutPIC NO" >> config/cf/linux.cf
libOSMesa.so is also not position independent, but there is no strait forward
way to remedy this. Nothing I know of links to this library, so it should not
cause a problem.
If you use a binary version of libGL.so, like the ones shipped by ATI for their
3D drivers, then you are screwed. You can however still use prelink for
everything else.
- Finally install the software. Prelink depends on libelf, so fetch:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~azarah/prelink/prelink-20050314.tar.bz2
http://mirror.hamakor.org.il/pub/mirrors/gentoo-portage/sys-devel/prelink/files/\
prelink-20040707-init.patch
prelink-20050314-amd64-gcc4.patch
and
http://www.mr511.de/software/libelf-0.8.5.tar.gz
Install libelf like this:
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-shared &&
make &&
make install
Install prelink like this:
patch -Np1 -i ../prelink-20040707-init.patch &&
patch -Np1 -i ../prelink-20050314-amd64-gcc4.patch &&
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc &&
make &&
make install &&
install -m644 doc/prelink.conf /etc/prelink.conf
If you use /opt you should add it to the config file like this:
echo "-l /opt/bin" >> /etc/prelink.conf
You might want to edit the /etc/prelink.conf file.
Prelink has an undo option to revert the system back to a pre-prelink stage. But
if you are paranoid, make a backup of the files that will be modified by prelink
by performing a dry run. For the record, I don't :-)
cd /var/tmp
prelink -vnamRf 2>/dev/null > dry-run
cat dry-run | grep "Would prelink" | sed -e "s:Would prelink ::" > bkup
for f in `cat bkup`
do
d=`dirname ${f}`
install -d /var/tmp${d}
cp -Lv $f /var/tmp${f}
done
Then actually prelink everything. The -R switch randomizes load addresses,
making the system slightly more secure:
prelink -amR
With Mozilla installed use:
prelink -amR --ld-library-path=/usr/lib/mozilla
If you get errors about libz.so make sure to use -fPIC in your CFLAGS and
install zlib again (just like the LFS book says). Then rerun 'prelink -amR'.
KDE knows about prelinking and it will start faster if you tell it you have it.
It is best to stick this in where all the users can use it. X.sh is a good place
if you use the BLFS shell scripts, or else use /etc/profile or something:
echo "export KDE_IS_PRELINKED=1" >> /etc/profile.d/X.sh
You should read 'man 8 prelink' too.
If you want to read the Gentoo stuff go here:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/prelink-howto.xml
- Previous prelinking efforts:
http://objprelink.sourceforge.net/
Many people confuse prelink with a previous (and now obsolete) technique
objprelink. Objprelink1 was first used as an optimization technique for KDE, but
is now obsolete with the newer version of Binutils that use combreloc. Combreloc
is now enabled by default in the newer Binutils. There is a newer version of
objprelink (objprelink2) but according to the authors of objprelink, the
technique does not provide any significant speed improvements over combreloc.
Also objprelink2 does not work with gcc-3.x based compilers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
* Thanks to Tushar Teredesai for the original prelink hint.
* Thanks to Jakub Jelinek for making the prelink(8) program.
* Thanks to Google and Debian for helping me figure out how to fix X11.
* Thanks to Gentoo for pointers on setting up prelink.
CHANGELOG:
[2005-03-23]
* Initial hint.
[2005-03-26]
* Adopted prelink.txt from Tushar, merged the two.
[2005-04-02]
* Added --ld-library-path=/usr/lib/mozilla and raised the suggested
free space. Fixed doccument width. Added -R to suggested prelink command.
[2005-06-19]
* Updated for gcc4 (patch).
* Using newest version possible (20050314).